I am likely to be offered a job as an M&A lawyer working in Bucharest. I used to be a TEFL teacher in Prague, which is why I am posting on this site. This also seems to be the best forum around for Romania.

I am a New Zealand citizen (and therefore non-EU). I have no possiblity of obtaining an EU passport.

Can anyone give me an idea of how difficult it currently is in Romania for a non-EU citizen to obtain a work permit? Also, what kind of documentation is required by the authorities? I assume copies of academic documents and birth certificates but is there anything else unusual (i.e. HIV test)?

My job will involve frequently leaving Romania to other CEE states and so I will be passing through passport control often. I automatically qualify for a 90 day visa on arrival but under the terms of that visa I can only stay for 90 days in any 180 day period.

My firm seems to have a fairly cavalier attitude towards this issue, which seems unusual for an international, Silver Circle law firm. This may be because it is not a major issue, and I hope that is the case.

Law firms in Romania generally have a pretty cavalier attitude to many things, and in my experience a great many are not up to western European standards of practice and ethics.

Much of this has to do with the standards of legal training in Romania, which can, to put it mildly, vary in quality from one university to another and where the transition in jurisprudential thinking to a market-economics ethos and good business practice remains incomplete. In addition, passing university exams, including in law faculties is, shall we say, a process that facilitates the expression of considerable creativity!!

Getting you sorted out with a work permit is the first thing your employer should be concerned with. Maybe he should hire a good lawyer

The firm is a Silver Circle (City) firm so the concerns relating to practices of Romanian firms is not really that relevant, although from what I know your comments are certainly accurate about Romanian legal education. No international law firm, such as the one I will be working for, would employ a Romanian lawyer without substantial post-graduate qualifications in Western Europe, North America or Australasia.

After further discussions it seems the firm is expecting to get me a work permit and temporary residency.

So my questions are now:

1. How long should I allow for the process?

2. Can a work permit and residency be obtained outside of my home country, or even better after I arrive in Romania?

3. Are there any really unusual things Romania requires for temporary residency (i.e. HIV tests) that I could start getting now?

There must be some US or Canadian citizens out there who have gone through this since EU accession.

Your employer, as Bebsi says, really should be handling this, or at the very minimum they should give you a local to help you find the various offices and do a lot of the translating/queuing for you. Decent-sized companies employing a lot of expat workers always have someone whose job it is to deal with these issues. Assuming your company provides you with a work contract then you'll get the work permit (and therefore the residence permit) but it's just a long, tedious and sometimes frustrating process.

If they're really not helping on this, then I would strongly recommend hiring the services of someone locally who can do all the paperwork processing and running around on your behalf. It'll be done in half the time and with a tenth of the stress.